Oh, it's perfectly safe from fire. See, a hydrocarbon world like that is a chemical Bizarro World. It's the oxidizers that you have to keep under control.
Indeed. I've occasionally wondered whether anyone at NASA has ever designed a UAV with oxygen or fluorine tanks instead of fuel tanks, for use on worlds with hydrogen/hydrocarbon atmospheres.
Going faster than c requires imaginary mass, if I recall my equations correctly. Of course, this article MAY have done something different than the basic playing with numbers everyone does when they first look at the SR equations. But the hype they're using to entice people to pay for the article doesn't indicate it actually contains anything new, or anything you can't figure out on your own with a standard physics textbook and 30 seconds of time. Now one thing I haven't ever done calculations for is collisions between superluminal and subluminal objects. That might be worth pondering during a few idle minutes this afternoon.
With the assumption that light travels at something very close to the speed of light but not exactly at it.
Actually, with the assumption that light has zero rest mass, and therefore travels only at exactly c. Index of refraction is a whole different story--Essentially you have electrons absorbing photons and emitting them again with a slight delay (Classically, lag caused by that whole electrons have mass thing preventing an instantaneous response to variations in the EM field).
And that has made me wonder by way of analogy--if a bunch of charged particles can effectively retard electromagnetic waves, would space filled with massive particles slow gravitiational waves?
What's missing? Not enough opportunity for graft? Not enough administrative overhead? No way to use politics to divide people? No union dues and slush funds? No way to censor "bad" ideas? No way to indoctrinate people into your belief system? No way to force bullies and their victims together? No one to tell the parents they're teaching their children wrong? No way for non-teachers to skim money out of the "system"? No one to fill out forms and do compliance paperwork?
...And no one to tell you your oncologist got his medical degree from Dr. Woo's School of Homeopathic Medicine.
Fear the idiot next to you who borrows the other idiot's club:)
Speaking of idiots and clubs, who wants to claim copyright on a bunch of malware anyway? Isn't that like saying "Hey, I'm a cyberterrorist and I don't want you looking at my tools?"
Just saying, sometimes it's tempting to troll right back.
Diverting the asteroid is a LOT less expensive and though it is disappointingly big hardon-creating explosion-free, (Sorry Mr. Teller, your pyro days are in fact over as I recall) it actually has an advantage over just blowing up the asteroid in that it is a solution created by an adult and not the world's most-respected Beavis-inspiring physicist child who just liked to blow shit up, and that it would work
Not necessarily. Even if you divert the asteroid from a predicted collision, it's still in an orbit that passes close to Earth's orbit. Unless, of course, you divert it into the moon or other massive target--in which case you do get the hardon-creating explosion the public is looking for.
This will be followed by a ban on interference filters and the like, effectively making amateur astronomy illegal in all but the most remote rural locations?
And . . . jeeze:
"Water, when exposed to vacuum, freezes."
No, it evaporates.
Or to be more precise, it evaporates, and the loss of heat due to the latent heat of vaporization results in cooling, which in turn results in freezing when the temperature gets sufficiently low (after which point you will still have some cooling due to sublimation of solid ice)..
Actually I thought about circulating human waste between an inner and outer hull. It would absorb the same types of radiation as other organic matter (Like human tissue), and as a bonus the radiation would tend to kill off any lurking pathogens.
Not really. nuke radiation is pretty much defined as alpha beta and gamma "waves/particles" plus our mostly artificially generated pal, the neutron. If we could make muons or other particles in bulk we'd probably add those. Delta waves and stuff are only found in star trek technobabble.
The concept of "rare" is kind of vague in particle physics.
Don't forget the odd decay by positron emission. (and subsequent annihilation radiation when that hits your passive shielding)
Well, to be fair it's not the steam that's radioactive. If they could remove the heavier elements out of the steam (perhaps by forcing it through a distillation column as it escapes?) the H2O wouldn't be an issue.
The Korean War was basically a draw. In many ways, it was an outright loss for the Americans, since they've had to keep troops stationed there for decades now, and this is quite costly.
By that logic, the Revolutionary War was a loss, because we've needed a US-based military for 200 years.
The main advantage of mining metals from asteroids isn't bringing them back to earth, it's saving the cost of lifting them from earth.
Aluminum isn't the best metal to build structures out of, it's just the cheapest we can launch up there and still get the job done.
I think Teflon was a result of a Manhattan Project commission
Actually teflon was an accident in a lab where they were working on alternative refrigerants several years before the Manhattan Project existed. (old refrigerators used anhydrous ammonia or sulfur dioxide, so saying "it kind sucked if they started to leak" is a major understatement.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, it's perfectly safe from fire. See, a hydrocarbon world like that is a chemical Bizarro World. It's the oxidizers that you have to keep under control.
Indeed.
I've occasionally wondered whether anyone at NASA has ever designed a UAV with oxygen or fluorine tanks instead of fuel tanks, for use on worlds with hydrogen/hydrocarbon atmospheres.
Going faster than c requires imaginary mass, if I recall my equations correctly. Of course, this article MAY have done something different than the basic playing with numbers everyone does when they first look at the SR equations. But the hype they're using to entice people to pay for the article doesn't indicate it actually contains anything new, or anything you can't figure out on your own with a standard physics textbook and 30 seconds of time.
Now one thing I haven't ever done calculations for is collisions between superluminal and subluminal objects. That might be worth pondering during a few idle minutes this afternoon.
With the assumption that light travels at something very close to the speed of light but not exactly at it.
Actually, with the assumption that light has zero rest mass, and therefore travels only at exactly c.
Index of refraction is a whole different story--Essentially you have electrons absorbing photons and emitting them again with a slight delay (Classically, lag caused by that whole electrons have mass thing preventing an instantaneous response to variations in the EM field).
And that has made me wonder by way of analogy--if a bunch of charged particles can effectively retard electromagnetic waves, would space filled with massive particles slow gravitiational waves?
What's missing? Not enough opportunity for graft? Not enough administrative overhead? No way to use politics to divide people? No union dues and slush funds? No way to censor "bad" ideas? No way to indoctrinate people into your belief system? No way to force bullies and their victims together? No one to tell the parents they're teaching their children wrong? No way for non-teachers to skim money out of the "system"? No one to fill out forms and do compliance paperwork?
...And no one to tell you your oncologist got his medical degree from Dr. Woo's School of Homeopathic Medicine.
Aren't potentially dangerous tools supposed to be getting lost?
Fear the idiot next to you who borrows the other idiot's club :)
Speaking of idiots and clubs, who wants to claim copyright on a bunch of malware anyway? Isn't that like saying "Hey, I'm a cyberterrorist and I don't want you looking at my tools?"
Just saying, sometimes it's tempting to troll right back.
Diverting the asteroid is a LOT less expensive and though it is disappointingly big hardon-creating explosion-free, (Sorry Mr. Teller, your pyro days are in fact over as I recall) it actually has an advantage over just blowing up the asteroid in that it is a solution created by an adult and not the world's most-respected Beavis-inspiring physicist child who just liked to blow shit up, and that it would work
Not necessarily. Even if you divert the asteroid from a predicted collision, it's still in an orbit that passes close to Earth's orbit. Unless, of course, you divert it into the moon or other massive target--in which case you do get the hardon-creating explosion the public is looking for.
Toughness and hardness are not the same thing.
OK, to be fair they did specify molecular bonds, now that I've read more closely...but then that would exclude ionic bonding, one would think.
Apparently the author of TFA has never heard of a type of material known as a metal either.
I think I'll have to dig up the Science article to get really meangful info on this.
This will be followed by a ban on interference filters and the like, effectively making amateur astronomy illegal in all but the most remote rural locations?
IABCOD "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of dishes!"
Might as well get a few more of them out there:
The BIG (Beaming Intergalactic Goatse) Array
27 Dishes of Hot Grits
And . . . jeeze: "Water, when exposed to vacuum, freezes."
No, it evaporates.
Or to be more precise, it evaporates, and the loss of heat due to the latent heat of vaporization results in cooling, which in turn results in freezing when the temperature gets sufficiently low (after which point you will still have some cooling due to sublimation of solid ice)..
Actually I thought about circulating human waste between an inner and outer hull.
It would absorb the same types of radiation as other organic matter (Like human tissue), and as a bonus the radiation would tend to kill off any lurking pathogens.
Not really. nuke radiation is pretty much defined as alpha beta and gamma "waves/particles" plus our mostly artificially generated pal, the neutron. If we could make muons or other particles in bulk we'd probably add those. Delta waves and stuff are only found in star trek technobabble.
The concept of "rare" is kind of vague in particle physics.
Don't forget the odd decay by positron emission. (and subsequent annihilation radiation when that hits your passive shielding)
Well, to be fair it's not the steam that's radioactive.
If they could remove the heavier elements out of the steam (perhaps by forcing it through a distillation column as it escapes?) the H2O wouldn't be an issue.
All prequels blow chunks, because we know what's going to happen. why bother.
Yeah, I hated that Hobbit book.
...except that technically wasn't a prequel, because it was released about 16 years before LotR.
The Silmarillion, on the other hand...
Depends on whether people are intelligent enough to invest in technology, rather than buzzwords.
That said, I've been pretty much underwhelmed with "web 2.0."
My uncle's cat figured out how to operate an answering machine.
By swatting the right button, he could play back my uncle's voice whenever he wanted.
They totally misread the request by the Dr. Evil, he asked for sharks with lasers ON their heads, not humans with lasers IN their heads.
But this would totally explain the "Why don't sharks get cancer?" meme that was going around a few years back.
The Korean War was basically a draw. In many ways, it was an outright loss for the Americans, since they've had to keep troops stationed there for decades now, and this is quite costly.
By that logic, the Revolutionary War was a loss, because we've needed a US-based military for 200 years.
I dunno, but there's this device called a "L.A.S.E.R." that sounds promising. Slashdot submission coming soon.
This Slashdot thread has now officially jumped the shark.
waitaminute, maybe you could attach one of those...
Why do you think metals?
The main advantage of mining metals from asteroids isn't bringing them back to earth, it's saving the cost of lifting them from earth.
Aluminum isn't the best metal to build structures out of, it's just the cheapest we can launch up there and still get the job done.
And... what problems does the higher lead concentration do? At least it does not seem to be fatal...
That depends on how you look at it.
Actually teflon was an accident in a lab where they were working on alternative refrigerants several years before the Manhattan Project existed. (old refrigerators used anhydrous ammonia or sulfur dioxide, so saying "it kind sucked if they started to leak" is a major understatement.)